When I had been through Namibia the first time round, I missed quite a bit due to a series of bike related problems that left me with a threadbare front tyre, panniers held together with string, and an inability to steer properly. This time would be better, right?
So why was I backtracking for the first time since Senegal (my thousand kilometre detour for a new rear tyre)? I had stayed in touch with Holly (remember her? We met in Tanzania and rode to Dar) and we had ended up talking about Namibia - her regretting that it wasn’t on her itinerary and me that I hadn’t seen it properly first time round. The chats turned into a plan, which turned into me getting a flight to Cape Town.
Why Cape Town? Well she was flying out of there a few weeks later, car rental was dirt cheap ($10 per day), and it made as much sense to drive down to Cape Town as to do a big loop back to Windhoek. And for me, it meant I had a chance to catch up with Alex again (remember her? we met in Malawi and she refused to ever read this blog).
My original plan was to have one night out with Alex and then give myself two and a half days to drive the 1500km to Windhoek. Well, like so many of the best laid plans, it didn’t quite pan out like that.
Within two hours of landing I was at the hostel that Alex and her friend Jake were staying at, having picked up cash, a SIM card and a new camera en route - I am so efficient! A couple of drinks in, I decided that it would be fine to sign up to a wine tour the next day (a day and a half was plenty of time to drive the best part of the thousand miles, surely), and then we all proceeded to have what would turn out to be a ridiculously heavy night out. The next morning was hideous - we all slept through the alarm, and woke up at 8.10, ten minutes after our transport arrived. With no time to wash or eat breakfast we all piled straight out and into the van (one stroke of luck was that we had all slept in our clothes, so that saved some time).
I literally crawled out of the van at the first winery. It was horrible. But, I saw it through (the owner did give me a free Coke because I was such a pathetic sight to behold). A couple of wineries in I was starting to perk up, but conscious of the fact that I had a lot of driving to do the next day I was holding back (a bit). The tour proceeded, as they inevitably do, with the group getting louder and more raucous as the day went on, culminating in me throwing Alex’s shoe onto the roof of the final winery (shades of Finchy from The Office right there; “he’s thrown a kettle over a pub - what have you done?”). We went back into town for some more drinks, though I had pretty much stopped and everyone else was too drunk to carry on by about 8 in the evening.
An early start the next morning was the start of an epic drive. In twelve hours of almost solid driving I covered 1200km of ground. It was pretty intense, but the next day it was just a shortish ride to the airport (I got the right airport at the second attempt) to meet a girl I had only really known for three days...
